EVOLUTION OF A PHONY SCANDAL
Fred Barnes reconstructs the recent history of the current Bush Administration nightmare. It began with a question to Ari Fleischer:
Fleischer botched the response. He gave a confusing and contradictory answer to whether the passage should have been included in the address....Late that evening, after Fleischer had departed with Bush and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice for Africa, a White House official told reporters the information on buying uranium was "not specific enough for us to be certain that attempts were in fact made." A second official said the claim, even attributed as it was to British intelligence, should not have been in the speech.
...Bush's Africa tour was overshadowed by a credibility issue back home.
Before the Bush entourage left, there had been a debate in the White House over how to handle the issue. Many senior aides believed the State of the Union passage under attack should have been flatly defended. After all, it had the advantage of being true.
...Still, one senior Bush official insisted the White House should yield on the point. The president went along. Since then, both Rice and CIA director George Tenet have stated the evidence of Iraq's activity in Africa was not sufficiently solid to warrant mention in the State of the Union. The president himself has never said so. Rather, he's defended the intelligence he gets as "darn good."
Within days of conceding an error was made, most of Bush's senior staff concluded they had made a mistake. No, it wasn't in mentioning Saddam's quest for uranium in the State of the Union in the first place. It was in making an admission of error about intelligence information. "We have nothing to apologize for," an official said.
Barnes also exposes the four media myth/lies about Dick Cheney's involvement, how the speech was drafted and more.
Who was the mystery "senior official" who insisted Bush must apologize for the SOTU address? I'd love to know.